Q&A: Erik Davis / Cyber-visionary comments on the nature of technology in the world today

Amy Moon, SF Gate Staff

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, April 25, 2002

2002-04-25 04:00:00 PDT San Francisco, California, USA -- Erik Davis, 34, is one of a group of mostly San Francisco Bay Area visionaries who helped create and define the techno-utopian cyberculture of the '90s. His 1998 book TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information is an examination of the mystical underpinnings of our technology obsession. It is variously described as an "apocalyptic synopsis of this century's technological climax" and an "EEG of our silicon unconscious and a recovered memory of sacred technologies."

I was curious to find out his impressions about the world now, post dot-com boom and post techno-utopian vision. His freewheeling conversation on this topic ranges from surveillance to a deconstruction of mainstream media to the need to participate in direct political and social action. His vision, while shifting somewhat from utopian to dystopian possibilities, remains strong.

Davis has written extensively about technology, spirituality and contemporary culture for such publications as The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and Spin and is a contributing editor at Wired magazine. He is also doing research for a new book (which he declined to discuss). The May issue of Wired features an article, "Songs in the Key of F12," about laptop techno. And his essay "Meditating in Sensurround" appears in the just-released book Radical Spirit: Spiritual Writings From the Voices of Tomorrow, edited by Stephen Dinan.

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SF Gate: A few years ago, you did an interview for the C.G. Jung Page and said, "This feeling of 'something just around the corner' is very compelling to the mythic mind, and technology (and the hype that surrounds it) provides it in spades." Do you feel that's still true today -- that technology provides the feeling of there being something just around the corner?

Erik Davis: We're in a space of reaction, of fear, of consolidation, of drawing lines in the sand, and when you're in that kind of space, the appeal of possibility is less, whereas in the '90s, the whole world of possibility was exciting, euphoric, money-making. What people were responding to is that sense of possibility, that thing of imminence. Now we also have a sense of possibility; it's just that the range of possibility for most of us has become much darker. In that scenario, technology takes on a different character, as a protector or as a snoop -- you know, a controller. So it's not that we escape the mythic dimension of technology, it's just that the technology has many different ways of producing that kind of experience.

It's kind of funny, because [technology] is not on people's minds, but it's not like it's stopped. It's not like they're not trying to make tiny little cameras that can fly through the air or push genetic engineering to a point where they can mint new kinds of drugs or play with all the reproductive technologies and all the bizarre ways that information technologies move into other fields of reality and create new possibilities. All that stuff is going apace; it's just that our media-cultural-social minds have been hit so strong and have reorganized [in such a way] that in some ways we're not paying that much attention. We're also very wary of that kind of intensity, because it now seems a little bit more fraught, whereas before it seemed more for fun and profit.

SF Gate: More fraught with danger, or potential negative effects?

Davis: Yeah, I think people are taking stock in that way. You don't need to be a very cynical person to look at technology in the world and find tremendous evidence for misapplication, misuse, abuse, excess, destruction, etc. That stuff was always there, but now we're a little more aware.

One of the most interesting responses I saw the first few months after 9/11 was that everybody was obsessed with possibility. That's all you were hearing -- the whole construct of social reality changed in the direction of nefarious possibilities. It was the same kind of thinking that came before; it's just that before, we were sitting there like, "Omigod, once we crack the genome, we'll be able to recombine all of these different DNA lines and produce new drugs," and you had this sense that every new technical development opened up all of these possibilities for new experience, new forms of profit, new kinds of human culture.

And then, after [9/11] happened, it wasn't like we simply went, 'OK, now we gotta get back to the reality.' No, we weren't talking about reality, we were talking about, "My God, they can reengineer this DNA in order to make it this highly contagious agent," and there would be conferences suddenly called of medical people getting together and coming up with the most horrific scenarios they possibly could that were then reported by the media. And we were sitting there consuming all of these dire scenarios with the same kind of ferocity with which we were earlier consuming all of these magnificent and science-fictional possibilities.

SF Gate: It's like the vision shifted from light to dark.

Davis: But it was still kind of visionary.

SF Gate: Yes, exactly.

Davis: Now, I think that we're in a very weird kind of holding pattern; lots of things are moving in different directions. People are kind of holding their breath. They're trying to just get a basic sense of what's good in life -- I hope, at least -- and maybe kind of reorganize priorities in that way. They seem to have pulled back a little bit from this obsession with the dark-side scenarios.

And now that we've been contemplating the possible scenarios of collapse, it's like the whole world's on eggshells. You're aware that all it takes is a few things here and there and everything is so deeply intertwined and speeds are so rapid and weapons are so powerful and computer networks are so poised on the edge of different kinds of collapse -- electrical grids, infectious agents -- everything is so poised, the whole game of scenarios becomes a weird one. And it's one in which we also play out in different ways mythic desires and mythic feelings about technology.

SF Gate: What kinds of myths are prevalent about technology today? The dark myths?

Davis: Well, I think the most important thing to talk about now is surveillance. The sense that your environment, or that something -- that you don't know -- in your environment is watching you, is very, very old. That's rooted in some real basic cultural and/or biological DNA. That's not necessarily mythological in itself, but it takes on a certain kind of power. It's been part of the technological world for 150 years. You can look back at the late 19th century and find people who were spinning paranoid fantasies about people manipulating their minds through radio waves. Those kinds of marginal ideas have always been kind of hovering around technology.

In the '90s we had The X-Files and that kind of stuff, but I think that now there's a more immediate and realistic sense of how much the spread of these kinds of invisible technologies of surveillance and control change the way we feel on a very basic moment-to-moment level. As we move through our day, as we say things, as we do things, we find ourselves suddenly self-censoring in ways that we hadn't before. It's no longer so appealing to enjoy a goofy show like The X-files, necessarily, so in that sense we're not so drawn to the myth of these things, but on another level, I think we're actually kind of experiencing it in a more direct way

SF Gate: There's a flip side to being watched or tracked, I think. A sense that you're being lied to all the time, like you don't know what the truth is.

Davis: Yeah, in addition to that, I believe there has been a sudden awareness that the networks of information flow, even the Internet, even the nonmainstream sources of news, are strangely corrupt. Particularly on the level of the mainstream. I think that there are a lot of people who would consider themselves skeptical of the CNN model of the world, even a little skeptical of some aspects of the [New York Times] model of the world, but still devoted to keeping aware of that model because, you know, on a certain level, it's true.

It's important to know what other people are thinking. But I think now there's been a shift where a lot of people, even if they still monitor these things, it's almost more like you're monitoring the programming, or it's like Hollywood. You're like, "Oh, this is the construct," "Oh, this is what they want to dominate." It's more like you're -- even if you resist paranoia and conspiracy theories and crude ideas of manipulation through the media -- there's this pervasive existential sense that it's kind of a show.

If people are invested in the news and trying to understand what's going on in the world outside of their immediate environment, then it raises some interesting problems, because to just give in to that model seems like giving into kind of a lie. Yet the other option we're faced with is this strange world which the Internet is so good at exemplifying -- one with lots of different scenarios supported by lots of different kinds of assertions which may or may not be facts, and even if they are facts, it's unclear how you begin to reconstitute it.

So, for example, let's say I become suspicious about the relationship between the oil industry and our foreign policy right now, and not just on the level of going, "Well, there's a lot of oil guys in the White House, but really, what's going on?" Like, "Why would oil be so important right now?" Maybe our ideas about how much oil there is aren't right; maybe things are a little more critical than we think they are. There are people out there -- smart people, interesting people, good information -- that'll mirror that back to me.

SF Gate: Yes, absolutely.

Davis: But I don't know what to make of that.

SF Gate: It'll mirror back anything.

Davis: Exactly, and then you start becoming aware that it'll mirror back all sorts of things.

SF Gate: You could say the opposite and it would mirror back just as well.

Davis: Exactly, like [it could say that] the technologies that are going to improve our energy situation are right around the corner. We're just on the lip of radical transformations in new kinds of technologies of energy that are going to produce that. Or I could even start getting into a sense that the world of political reality is so corrupt, it's only by becoming deeply and intensely spiritual and kind to the people right around me that I'm going to sustain the world.

SF Gate: I wanted to ask you about that. At the time that you wrote TechGnosis, or even before it, what was your feeling about how technology interplays with spirituality or how it affects spirituality? Did you have some expectations, and did those expectations come to fruition, or did something different happen?

Davis: It's very complicated to me, because I look at things on different levels. So on one level, I was just interested to see how religious ideas, images, stories became mixed up in our images and stories about technology. On another kind of basic level, I would say at least at that point, technology was serving as a kind of way for people to express, come to terms with, reimagine, hopes, dreams, intuitions that in some other context or some other sense would be more appropriately called spiritual.

So, on the one level, it was replacing; on another level, it was tempting away; on another, it was realizing. You know, all of these things were happening simultaneously in my mind, and it didn't seem like it was really getting to the core of the issue. Like, ultimately, most of the crossovers of spirituality and technology that I talked about in my book were not only sort of superficial but sometimes actually probably not the right way to go.

SF Gate: I think you said in the C.G. Jung interview that we were pumped up on techniques of ecstasy, that in a way these tools of expanded communication and consciousness take us away from ourselves, from our basic condition. Like Marshall McLuhan said, they're extensions, but they're also amputations, so maybe that's what you're talking about. We kind of made technology into something that we needed, but in fact, it was sort of a dream.

Davis: Yeah, that's a good way of thinking about it. It had that quality of...

SF Gate: A savior?

Davis: Realized-dream time. And at the same time, the kinds of technological programs, possibilities that could and still can "save us" or save aspects of the world or help to really reorganize some of the dire problems, they receive comparatively little energy and input. It's not like there aren't some pretty good ideas out there.

SF Gate: Like what?

Davis: Oh, I think there's quite a number of reasonable partial solutions to a whole host of environmental problems that have to do with energy, that have to do with how we deal with waste. There's a lot of stuff out there that's not half bad. Let's throw some money at that and see what we come up with. If you go to a conference like the Bioneers, you don't walk away thinking, "What a bunch of complainers," you walk away going, "Geez, let's get it in gear here, guys."

Because the world seems ever more precious and fragile -- by the world, I mean our civilization, our race and our human reality as well as the physical biological matrix that sustains it -- and because of that, the idea of possibility is no longer a big deal. It's like, so what? There are infinite possibilities. Where do we actually put our energy and attention, both politically and ecologically, environmentally?

SF Gate: As somebody who was very involved in describing or even creating the culture of technology and the mythology of technology, to have that change over the past year or couple years, how do you assimilate that?

Davis: Well, it wasn't at all surprising to me, because, as I said, the historical part of my book taught me with absolute assurance that these things come and go. And that the moment of really dreaming doesn't last that long -- that you have a moment of really dreaming, and then the prospectors and bankers and politicians move in and you generate all the problems of modern mass media. So I wasn't surprised by any of that.

It just seemed to me that when there was a quasi-utopian space inside of the engine of late capitalism, when that emerged, you should check it out, try to water it, try to make it as interesting and intelligent as it could be. You know, I'd still rather have that. I'd still rather live in a Mondo 2000 world than the one I live in now. Even if I think the Mondo 2000 world is kind of ridiculous, it was still something worth...

SF Gate: Celebrating...?

Davis: Or just trying to keep, make more intelligent, by continuing to talk about it.

SF Gate: Then is it relevant to talk about groupware, virtual reality, advanced biofeedback, all of these things that were sort of these utopian visions five, six, seven years ago?

Davis: I think it is, except under a heightened sense of pragmatism. It's like those possibilities are all there, it's just that it's no longer interesting to us anymore. The mere fact of possibility, it's like, "Well, what's actually going to work?" And that for some people, that might mean, "What is going to work in our collapsed economy?" But it also means, "How's it actually going to help the situation, how's it actually going to help people?" That's the kind of pragmatism I hope people are bringing to the fore.

I don't think it's the place to talk about the deep issues. I mean, if TechGnosis is even half right, then what we were doing in the '90s was trying to grapple with the big stuff -- What does it mean to be alive? Who am I ? What's the world for? Why do I dream? You know, all that stuff that we were trying to do through technology, and I don't think that's an appropriate way to go -- perhaps ever, but certainly not now. So it's not a time to respark the engines of hype and utopian expectations. But it is a time to look really seriously at the genuine possibilities of different kinds of emerging networks that can use the Internet as a backbone to reorganize actual social communities, actual exchanges of goods and services.

That's pretty interesting stuff that also requires a little change of worldview. I mean, there are certain ways of seeing the world that can be promulgated and sustained through interesting and novel deployments of the media. Such deployments have a decent chance of providing an alternative view of how we could organize things, compared to what we see kind of coming down the pike. So, on that level, it seems very important to not just turn away from those visionary possibilities because something new's gotta happen for something new to happen, and if something new doesn't happen -- you know, dot, dot, dot.